Gender Regulation: Renée Richards Revisited

In 1976, a reporter at a tennis tournament identified the rookie standout Renée Clarke as Renée Richards, the former male professional tennis player Richard Raskind. The discovery of Richards, a male-to-female transsexual, immediately caused protest. While Richards’ very presence disrupted the socially constructed conceptions of ‘male’ and ‘female’ in sport – and her successful legal suit for inclusion into women’s professional tennis challenged the long-standing system of segregation in athletics – she has continuously embraced societal understandings of gender difference. Building on previous research, the author utilises Richards’ two autobiographies and a 2009 oral history to analyse her embodiment of stereotypical femininity and later opposition to the International Olympic Committee’s Stockholm Consensus. In addition, a comparison of the New York Supreme Court case – which ruled Richards eligible to compete professionally as a woman – and the Stockholm Consensus demonstrates the widespread concern with gender malleability. Both decisions extended classification to include transsexual athletes, yet each preserved a two-sexed model. This article illustrates an individual and institutional conviction in the naturalness of two separate and polar gender categories.